Organizations in various industries use electronic commerce for communicating business information including purchase order and order supply information. One method for communicating electronic commerce information uses a value added network as a clearing house for messages between organizations. The value added network thereby allows organizations to participate in electronic commerce in an efficient and cost effective manner. Such a value added network provides connectivity for participating organizations and, in general, can receive messages from originator organizations, process the messages, and forward appropriate messages to recipient organizations. Since many organizations have dissimilar computer environments, the value added network provides advantages to the participating organizations by interfacing with and between the dissimilar environments. An organization that is an originator of a message need only transmit its message to the value added network and is not forced to worry about communicating directly with intended recipient organizations.
However, value added networks can suffer from a number of problems. For example, conventional value added networks are typically architected to have geographically centralized processing which can increase costs of connection for geographically remote organizations. In addition, conventional value added networks can suffer from a susceptibility to catastrophic failure produced by exterior causes such as power failure or problems with public communication networks. Also, where a global public data network, such as the Internet, is used to provide the backbone for communications, additional problems with security, reliability and performance are introduced into the network.